Dog Bombs!

Chris Morris has apparently joined the Iraqi insurgency:Link.

On a barren stretch of road in northern Iraq, a dog rigged with explosives approaches a group of Iraqi police officers. Detonated by remote control, the bomb tears the dog apart but doesn't harm the cops.

In a war where the line between civilian and soldier is blurred, even man's best friend has been caught up in the combat. U.S. forces hail their trained dogs as heroes, but to insurgents, canines provide the means for a more sinister goal.

Iraqi police cite the recent use of dogs rigged with explosive devices in Latifiya, just south of Baghdad, in Baqubah in central Iraq and in and around the northern city of Kirkuk...[snip]...Abdel Salam Kubaisi, a spokesman for the Muslim Scholars Assn., a hard-line Sunni Arab clerical organization sympathetic to insurgents, called the practice un-Islamic. "Our religion does not permit us to hurt animals," he said, "neither by using them as explosive devices nor in any other manner."..

Now, now. You'd better stop exploding the puppies or you won't go to heaven...yes. The Chris Morris Archive returns this:

Stretchcast Originally broadcast on 09/02/1994
Top gits tonight: evidence mounts that the Police have taken to eating suspects, the IRA launch a campaign of dog bomb attacks in mainland Britain, a top scientist delivers a shock report on near-death experiences, and Alan Partridge presents his World Cup Countdown to ’94. So long as Peter O’Hanrahahanrahan doesn’t lose the news, that is.

From radar to wind turbines

The most northerly inhabited island in Britain, Unst, hopes to build its economy on producing hydrogen fuel from wind power and rain, both of which it has in abundance. For the last thirty years, the biggest employer, practically the only employer, was a huge RAF over-the-horizon radar station, built to guard NATO's northern flank - the shortest route for Soviet Tupolev 22M3 (Backfire) bombers to take to Britain with nuclear bombs, and one that avoided the vast military buildup of the Nato central front. Now, The Threat is gone, and anyway, NATO's air defence in the north is well covered by radars positioned hundreds of miles forward in Lithuania, near the putative bases of any attack. Saxa Vord's twin, the Danish-run Pole Star radar on the Faeroes, has already been switched off for good.

The plan is to build several huge wind turbines that would produce electricity to electrolyse water and to liquefy the hydrogen for transport. The cost of production is estimated at 15p a gallon (although hydrogen is more usually charged in kilos). Pale fire, drawn from wind and water - an idea of north, as compelling as that cold-war image of huge sentinel antennas erected in the snow...

(sorry about the cod-Ballard finish)

Ordinary men

This story is chilling:

"It then emerged that in June 1992, a Visegrad police inspector, Milan Josipovic, had received a macabre complaint from the manager of Bajina Basta hydroelectric plant across the Serbian border, asking whoever was responsible to please slow the flow of corpses down the Drina. They were clogging up the culverts in his dam, well downriver from Jasmin's and Mersud's Zepa graveyard.

Only in Austria

When I was a student at the University of Vienna, life was often rendered more interesting by the antics of the Burschenschaften, weird student fraternities partly left over from the 1840s who enjoyed rituals such as dressing up in bizarre coloured period fig, giving themselves silly names, drinking industrial quantities of ale - oh, and attacking each other with real actual swords, in case you might mistake them for any given Rag Week stunt. Rather more seriously, they also enjoy such pastimes as pursuing rightwing politics - sometimes extremely right-wing politics - and operating a highly influential old-boys network. In fact, there are a couple that are routinely watched by the political police as possible neo-Nazi recruitment groups.

Now, being the Institute for Political Science, you can probably guess that our view of them was, ahem, a tad jaundiced. Pretty much everyone looked at them as fascist scum at worst and pompous throwbacks at best. Every Wednesday, they trooped into the main hall of the University in order to honour their dead at a huge marble head of Siegfried that lies in the centre of the hall. That may not sound so objectionable, but the (interwar) installation of the head had been somehow associated with Nazis - I forget the detail, but it wasn't particularly closely associated. But these boys also made a point of holding a service at the Heldenplatz war memorial every year on May the 8th, specifically dedicated to the Wehrmacht's dead. Which meant there was a corresponding ritual on our side, as a demonstration would gather in the hall in an effort to prevent them doing their thing. It was all entirely silly.

Now, I had never imagined that women might be involved in anything vaguely like a Burschenschaft, but it seems I'm wrong. Austria's Interior Minister, Liesl (Elisabeth) Prokop of the OVP, has been outed, so to speak, as being an honorary life member of a she Burschenschaft, the Elisabethina. This particular club, it turns out, is officially monarchist in tendency (Unser Motto=Kaiser Otto, it sez on their website here. In fact, I'm surprised they have a website.), which caused a row as Austria is a republic. Now, Prokop saw fit to deny it, claiming she had been invited as a guest of honour only. But, it turns out, she was included in their roll of members - until they attempted to "Remove All Traces!" from the website. Good old Archive.org gave them away. It further turns out that under the club's constitution, she would be a life member anyway.

The whole affair, trivial though it is, raised some interesting questions. For a start, was Austria's answer to Charles Clarke really spending her free time attempting to run her closest friends, by tradition her sisters, through with a sabre? And there were also important implications for the German language. Bursche means something like "lad". And the terminology is all masculine - brothers and fathers of the chapter and such. Damen-Burschenschaft? Surely not. Frauen-Burschenschaft? Just as illogical, and jarringly modern. The correct term for their members, it turns out, would be Schwesternschafterinnen. And no, hers does not fight duels, although from their website it would seem they drink as much as the blokes.

However, she was given the name Freya by the sisters as in the Nordic goddess - you can see what kind of people we're dealing with here. And there is apparently at least one female outfit that does indeed draw cold steel at the hat of a drop..

Classic snark, and an interesting point

The Portadown News is a cracker this week.

"Ian Paisley has promised to keep Sinn Fein out of government by keeping himself out of government. "There will be no surrender to the IRA's surrender," the leader of Northern Ireland's largest party said. "After fifty years, republicans are just as dangerous as I have always needed them to be and it's still not my fault."

On more serious NI-related business, the three alleged IRA men who vanished from Colombia have appeared in Ireland and have said they don't consider themselves on the run. I wonder. I seem to recall hearing on a squaddie site couple of months back that one of them had been sighted in South Armagh, but checking I can't find any reference to it...you do wonder how long the preparations for the super-statement had been going on. In a deep historical sense, I'd say since 1973, when both the UK and the Republic joined the then EEC. Without the IRA and hence the army presence on the border, the border will rapidly lose reality, especially with the Common Travel Area. Especially with SF in government on both sides of it, the remaining flags'n'anthems stuff isn't much to fight over.

Tuesday Afternoon Econoblogging

An official email reaches me, telling all staff that our company's journalists must now pay the full delegate fee, plus 10% if they want lunch, when they attend conferences arranged by our conferences division. So - let's get that straight. I pay £1,000 to the conferences division and charge it to expenses. Publishing is down £1k. Conferences are up £1k. Overall, the net gain to shareholders is zero. So - why bother?

Then, of course, I realise that the conferences division has targets to hit..and who is a more captive audience than our own employees? Can you guess where this brilliant idea came from? Ah, incentives and rent-seeking behaviour..

We all have our markers..

..the things that set the parameters of our ideas. Those formative events and thoughts that go with us on whatever weird trajectory we take through life. Politics is always like that, which is one of the reasons I mourn Robin Cook.

A short list of my own founding concerns would run something like this: The long recession of the 80s/early 90s, and the ERM crisis. I know the late 80s were pretty good statistically, but I doubt anyone would have noticed it had they had to base their estimates on West Yorkshire. Bradford, and Leeds for that matter, looked like there was a war on and we were losing. Now there is, we're losing, and they are much improved. It's the economy, stupid...and it was, both economic and stupid.

The Criminal Justice Act, 1994, Roads for Prosperity and such. And, just as importantly, the impassioned opposition to them. I still find it positively insane that the government tried to make music it didn't like illegal...and then I see the government wants to censor bookshops. I'm still angry about the Major government's insane transport policy and the violence it deployed to push it through, and even more so about them comparing themselves to the Romans whilst they were at it. And then I see the government busy widening the M25...

Bosnia. This is why I'm not a pacifist - after the years of obfuscation and hand-wringing, it turned out that a little force would have been enough to stop it all along. It also turned me on to the European achievement of keeping the peace in a continent of national states, and its failings. Much of the Iraq debate, at least in its blogospheric form, is essentially an extension of the Balkans and "Humanitarian Intervention" - if you were up for Kosovo, it seems, you were up for Iraq. Most of the "Decent Left", or whatever they call themselves this week, are essentially the remnant of the old intervention lobby less the ones who realised that the Iraq war was insane. Which makes me an outlier on the political graph - I agree with the idea of humanitarian intervention, and I see a need for a clearer legal doctrine, but I was against the Iraq invasion from before the word "go" for a mixture of moral and strategic reasons.

Aitken, Archer, and BSE. Ah, the classic scandals. When you next hear rightwing people howling about "Oil for Food", you better remind them of how a cabinet minister who had financial interests in the sale of dual-use gear to Iraq intervened in a criminal case to keep evidence secret. And how John Major, who conventional wisdom now says was "portrayed as sleazy" by Alistair Campbell, changed the Bill of Rights of 1688 so Jonathan Aitken could sue the Guardian - entirely fraudulently, in the process inducing his daughter to perjure herself. I remember delivering the newspapers through how many dark winter mornings, reading the latest eruption of sleaze or monster policy in the headlines. I can still remember where I was when I delivered the Grauniad's He Lied And Lied And Lied issue, but not A Liar And A Cheat, although I remember reading it.

Which pretty much sets the picture for most of my political concerns. Obviously, I didn't take any of them that far. I didn't run away to lash myself to Manchester Airport or join the Mujahideen. Some people did.

(Please note - I'm working up to another post about West Yorkshire, multiculturalism, and the recent past, but it's going to be tough. As is the long-delayed Chichakli.com rebuttal.)

Hull, Again

Just in case you've yet to become convinced I harbour a blood loathing of Hull...Annie Mole of the Tube blog reports that Hull City AFC fans were heard chanting "You're just a town full of bombers" at Queen's Park Rangers this weekend, bearing out everything I said about them.

An Anglo-British Dispute

Over at t'Sharpener, Justin has a long post about Basra, the growth of theocracy in Iraq, Steven Vincent's criticism of the British occupation authority's alleged indulgence of political Shi'ism, and a perceived lack of support from the pro-war side for secularism in Iraq. I was moved to drop off this comment, which ought to be a post in its own right:

It should be pointed out, I think, that the people of Basra voted by an overwhelming majority for the SCIRI. They apparently know who they want to speak for them, and it sure as hell isn’t Nick Cohen. It would seem to be the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, through the medium of either the Sadrites or SCIRI.

I would query whether or not it is morally better to Fallujahise Basra, as we would end up doing if we were to demand a purge of the police (if we had enough troops - it’s a big place), or to accept the realities of a conservative Shia society. Putting yourself in their shoes, you might not like those realities, you might not want to live in them - but would you really prefer to die by 120mm shell fragments instead?

The whole “are we doing enough to support decent Iraqi democrats” debate seems to me to be an entirely Anglo-British (by analogy with “Franco-Francais”) story - whatever we do, the Iraqi democratic Left (or Right, I’m sure there must be someone somewhere answering that description) is going to lose, and whatever feeble support the denizens of Harry’s muster will do nothing to change that. The Iraqi secularists are like the non-communist nationalists of Vietnam - “une douzaine de messieurs”, three students and a dog. They are not a viable constituency in Iraqi politics outside Kurdistan.

In fact, the only successful faction in Iraq that offered anything like a Western society was the Ba’ath. (snark)I don’t see the Decent Left signing up to fight with the Sunni guerrillas - anyway, they couldn’t feed David Aaronovitch for more than a couple of days without attracting attention. There aren’t enough pies in Iraq for that. (/snark)

Unfortunately, the best form of support the British Left can offer secular Iraqis would be to countersign their applications for political asylum. I think someone suggested this recently - perhaps we could get a Pledgebank going?

It's snarky, I know, probably snarkier than I'd like for a post on TYR. But slightly different standards apply to comments.

My point is this - there were two major forces for secularism and what might be termed a Western society in Iraq, and they were the Ba'ath Party and the Communist Party. Now, over the Saddam years the Ba'ath got progressively less secular as Saddam resorted to manipulating tribalism and Islam to remain in power. War meant he could no longer deliver the main attraction of Ba'athism - the promise of technocratic modernisation, so he had to fall back on other means. The Communists have been reduced to insignificance inside Iraq by decades of repression, and are now more of an exile movement. There is simply no mass secular constituency, and we are fools to imagine one. Secularism in Iraq is an artefact of an urban middle class who did well out of Ba'athism up to 1991.

There might - might - have been an opportunity in the spring of 2003 to change that. Intermediate institutions like the trade unions could have helped, I suppose, but I doubt it. Either way, it's now academic. The question in Iraq is how to minimise the suffering. And attempting to carry through a secularist social revolution in the MND(SE) zone at this late hour is a project so Quixotic it rivals the invasion of Iraq itself. Presumably we would start by purging the police force, which would mean no police and a re-manning of the Sadrists. Then, I suppose, we would have to depose the Shia politicians - who were, after all, elected by a huge majority. Basra will fight, they would say, and Basra will be right.

We would then have successfully started a major campaign of urban warfare. Ho hum. There are 1.5 million people in the city, and 9,000 troops in MND(SE). The ratio is far worse than in Northern Ireland, for example. The answer to this is that firepower could be substituted for manpower. Instead of the grey Land Rover, the Challenger 2 tank. How many of those secular Iraqis would be killed or wounded? How many people in short?

It's a debate completely without relevance to the ground truths, a matter between British intellectuals. Fortunately for the Iraqis and the soldiers, though, they aren't in command, and therefore it won't happen. And, for anyone who thinks the American occupation authority has been a model of idealism compared with those terrible colonial (or is it politically correct and hence weak?) Brits, go and read this. And - by the way - we should be actively considering how and who to take with us when we leave Iraq. My crack about a Pledgebank to support an Iraqi's asylum application is more serious than it sounds.

RIP Robin Cook

Nobody will go. As the right honourable gentleman said last week, there will be no regrets and no resignations. Not only is this a Government that cannot accept blame, it is a Government with no shame.

Robin Cook MP, House of Commons debate on the Scott Report on illegal arms exports to Iraq, 1996. He will be sadly missed.

Blogroll Time

First: TYR is the second result on Google for "What was Ernest Hemingway doing when he was falsely reported dead?

You can't begin to imagine how proud I am.

Secondly, it's about time to recognise some blogs I've started reading. So: Actually Existing Phil, Irregular Anthony, Indigo Jo of Blogistan, John B of Shot By Both Sides, Jamie Kenny of Blood & Treasure, Organic Warfare, Martin Geddes's Telepocalypse, the Engineer Poet's Ergosphere (where you should read this), Praktike and Co.'s Liberals Against Terrorism, James Hamilton's Econbrowser, Dsquared's Digest, Ken's Militant Moderate, Slugger O'Toole - have a link!

Yes, I do read a LOT of blogs. I'd also like to draw public attention to the fact that Alhamedi of The Religious Policeman is out of jail Saudi Arabia and blogging anew after a 12-month hiatus.

Bloggin' Rugby League: The City Known as 'Ull

Replying to this post, "Kevin" writes:

You're right about Hull fans. The only time I've ever been scared at a rugby league match was watching Wigan at Hull in the 1980s when some of the home fans charged the away stand. But it was a midweek match on the other side of the country so most of the Wigan crowd were children and old ladies. There was no one to fight with so they ended up milling about, snarling.

Milling about, snarling...I recall a very similar experience (touched-on on Monday) at Keighley in (I think) 1996. It must have been about that long ago, because we were good. So good, in fact, that we went 20-0 up in less than even time.

Now, at Cougar Park away fans tend to pack into one end of the ground, the so-called Turner stand. Or rather, they used to pack - when you're entertaining Chorley Lynx rather than Hull, Warrington or Sheffield in their pre-merger, cup-winning days, "pack" isn't quite the right verb. "Wander", perhaps, or "rattle". But this was then, and the Airlie Birds' away following has always been sizeable, so the place was thronging with Hullers pointing sheepishly at hills, sheep and comparable Dales signifiers. By the luck of the draw, Keighley kicked off towards the unofficial (no football apartheid in RL) "away end", so each try was scored directly in front of a particularly noisy and boozed-up segment of the crowd. Of course, as the beating continued, they got noisier and spirits like our scrawny-but-pugnacious scrum-half, Chris Robinson, were drawn to celebrate each score there..anyway, as we waited for Simon Irving (has my memory just farted, or was his nickname something like Eggs?) to line up yet another conversion for 24-0, there was an ugly yelling and they kicked over the hoardings around the pitch and chased the ref across the park towards us.

The official vanished into the players' tunnel, passing two cops and three stewards who were running, quixotically, towards the mob as if to quell it all on their own. Fortunately, they thought better of this and backed off as they spilled onto the pitch. For a moment, I was wondering if they would keep going towards D stand, where I sat, in some kind of "take the home end" scenario. Note: at Keighley in 1996, there was a main stand called D stand, the Turner stand as described, an open terrace at the opposite end called B Kop, and a decrepit area of covered terrace opposite D stand called the Scrattin' Shed. No, it doesn't make sense, but if you think that's weird you should have seen the club's accounts.

But, as Kevin mentioned, nobody seemed to be looking for trouble from the positively genteel D stand crew and they didn't have the out-and-out football viciousness to provoke themselves further, and ended up milling around and, indeed, snarling. Further back, though, in the stand they had left, a group of Keighley fans were more forthcoming and a succession of brawls broke out. Eventually, Bill, Bob and their many brothers arrived, and herded them back in the Turner, which was temporarily segregated by lines of cops. A number of arrests were made; the only notable one was of a man called Sean Cutler, described by the Keighley News as a "Keighley Cougars financial backer" but better known as a routine thug. The match resumed and Keighley won, heavily. Hull's chairman, an Australian called Shane Richardson, endeared himself to us by telling BBC Radio Leeds that it was all our fault because the hoardings were insufficiently strong to restrain his followers. Which was an impressive exercise in chutzpah.

Another brush with them occurred in Hull itself. Hull FC now perform in a spiffy palace built with the proceeds of Hull City Council's sale of shares in its unique municipal telco, Kingston Communications. The shares were sold, wisely, in the spring of 2000, when anything vaguely associated with telecommunication was valued above diamonds by the stock market. The council proceeded to behave like, well, a Hull fan who won the lottery and blew the lot on a string of ill-advised prestige projects. By RL standards, the ground they now have is positively Saudi in its grandeur. My favourite was the council estate that was refurbished from top to bottom - and then demolished. Back then, they played at a pissridden dump called The Boulevard, so named because it lay on Airlie Street (which is why they are the Airlie Birds). It was one of the most famous grounds in the game, the stage for legendary derby clashes with the ancestral Leeds and Hull KR enemies, touring Australian and New Zealand sides, even Test matches. Like most of the famous Rugby League grounds, by the 1990s it was a dark, dilapidated, filthy shithole fit for some kind of grim documentary film on urban deprivation. When Keighley hit it that year, it was dark throughout the game, with fog smelling in from the oil refinery and the bizarre feature that I could look out from my seat in the stand named, with heavy irony, the Best Stand and look up at the waterline of a ship in the docks.

As it was, we lost narrowly and controversially whilst the far-famed Threepenny Stand - in fact, a plastic 80s prefab plonked on the foundations of its predecessor - bawled foul and bigoted abuse at us and the referee struggled to keep up through the subarctic gloom. The weird thing about Hull is that there is another professional club in town, Hull Kingston Rovers, a distinction the place shares only with Leeds and London (just) among British cities - and their fans are entirely decent. It's not a class thing, because the tribes are separate geographically and HKR country includes the docks and the Bransholme estate, supposedly the biggest council estate in western Europe and by any measure one of the roughest in Yorkshire. Hull FC gets the west half of town, which includes the dirt-poor bits around the defunct fishing port but also the suburbs and the city centre..so what is it?

In case anyone thinks I harbour a prejudice against Hull, I shall follow this up with a similar assault on Leeds RLFC before the cup final..

Update: Did I mention them being touchy? (See the alternate comments thread for details)

That Military Capital/Labour Balance Again

IN the past I've suggested that one of the essential problems facing the US armed forces in Iraq, and more broadly all modern armies in a world of messy little wars, is best thought of in economic terms. In any firm, there is a theoretical optimum combination of capital and labour used to process one unit of land(in the economic sense - that is, including all natural non-human resources) that maximises productivity and hence profitability. You can draw a graph showing the possible combinations for any given version of the problem, and it will be a convex curve about the origin. The optimal combination is the furthest point on the curve from the origin. That's the theory.

When you turn up at a row at a petrol station with a 155mm self-propelled howitzer and crew, it should be pretty obvious that you are too far towards the capital end of the scale, if we assume that material is equivalent to capital in the destruction industry. You have a factory crammed with stuff until it's too dangerous to walk through the door and too expensive to turn any of it on. Now, I've just been reading up on cognitive-radio systems, and this made me think of the problem. Cognitive radio means that a radio device implemented in software can intelligently change its behaviour in response to the radio environment. That's a minimal definition. Think seeking out the part of the radio spectrum that is least busy, or setting different channels different priorities. Another use of the concept, the one I'm professionally interested in, is so-called overlay networking, where a communication device chooses between the different forms of radio access in its area depending on some criterion or other. For example, your phone call might go over a free Wi-Fi network if there's one around, over the cheapest 3G data channel, failing that over the cheapest 3G voice channel, failing that over good old GSM - that's assuming you set it to "find cheapest" rather than "find most reliable" or "find fastest" or "find the Crazy Frog".

A huge amount of research in this field, though, is the work of the military. Practically everyone involved seems to work for DARPA, whether directly or at one remove. And some of their plans for smart radio are of stupefying ambition. Check this presentation from General Dynamics out. (Beware techy link, pdf.) If you stagger on past the first few radiohead slides, you'll get to their aspirations for cognitive radio. Apparently it's going to be waveform aware, spectrally aware, network aware, geographically aware, locally-available services aware, user needs and requirements aware, speaks and understands your language, situation aware, security policy aware, adapts and optimises, learns usage patterns of user, applies model-based reasoning to current context. And they're also talking biometrics, not to mention GPS. Now, think of that list of requirements - what other military field system would be capable of all those things? (Forget the first three radiohead/bellhead items)

Yes - that's right. That would be a competent soldier adequately prepared for their task.

Now, have a read of this from Jamie Kenny on the death of an American blogger in Basra. Please forgive me my slightly callous comment, by the way. But, having read his blog, which seems to be marked by a strange Anglophobia and a serious failure to understand that political Shi'ism is very much a locally-available service in Basra, I can't help wondering what he expected to find. And - going back to the language discussion between Irregular Analyses, Intel Dump and me - is the sheer astonishing scope of what is being proposed for mere radios an admission of defeat?

And Now for Some Rugby League Blogging

We haven't had anywhere near as much sportblogging here as I thought..so it's time to remedy that. Yesterday saw a first in league's history, as a French team ran out in a Challenge Cup semi-final. Toulouse made it by beating Widnes soundly, in a match held on their home ground. However partisan you may be, I can't help thinking that a Toulouse away trip that ended in a loss would be far easier to wear than a long bus drive back from, say, Whitehaven on a winter Wednesday night after a beating. Even if you're a long way from Widnes and you've lost, you are still in southern France. That may not be victory, but it's all right. It's been an achievement, even though the French did admittedly cop a lucky draw, not having to take on full-time opponents until the quarter finals and drawing together with French opposition at least once.

But that could only go so far. For the semis, they got given Leeds. The world champs, in their Yorkshire back yard. Pure hell...no-one gave them a chance, quite rightly. Until the action began. Toulouse seized the initiative right from the first kick of the ball. Literally. They started the game with a short kickoff, a risky surprise move that perhaps should get more use, and although Leeds fielded it they regained the ball in a mobhanded chase. And, with less than two minutes gone, they scored. Leeds recouped quickly enough, but Toulouse weren't quitting, scoring twice more. A huge second rower, Sebastien Reguin, described during the Widnes match as "a mountain on wheels" and a traffic warden in civil life, was torturing the Leeds backs as a wide runner. As a team, they were producing some extremely flash rugby. They were down 18-22 at half time, having scored last and missed out narrowly on a fourth.

Needless to say, it didn't last. (This is where we get to the nub of the post, by the way.) I'd said, at the time of the first try, that Toulouse would compete for 60 minutes and then cave in. Leeds scored just after half-time, and just after the hour mark all organised resistance collapsed and the champions' backline began scoring tries at will. Leeds put over 34 points to nothing in the second half, taking the match from a real struggle (which it had been) to an unmerciful hammering. The final score was 52-18.

I should be pleased the French got so far. But I'm concerned that it was so predictable. I fear that the game, at the top level, has reached a sort of permanent physical lead over all other clubs that no-one will ever be able to compete with the British top five, the Aussies and the NZ Warriors. I would estimate that Leeds scored 24 or so points on skill, and the rest on still being on the park after Toulouse ran out of puff. In the first half, you wouldn't have picked the French as a worse side. This primacy of the gym worries me, because I find it hard to enjoy sports that are closed to amateurs. Football has the FA Cup, we have the Challenge Cup, and in theory upsets should be possible. Formula 1 racing annoys me, rallying doesn't. The question is whether the top teams have reached a new level of perfection in the sport, or whether they simply have the money to commit to fitness levels that trump quality. I don't think it's that far gone - yet.

Toulouse, in fact, reminded me very much of an early-mid 90s Leeds team, one of Doug Laughton's supremely flash-but-flaky sides. They were riddled with talent, fantastic to watch, but never up to the physical and mental standard Wigan set. Leeds would always look great in the first half, then cave as the pie-eating legions wore them out and drained their morale. And as always with league, once the buggers got advantage, you were in a world of consequences and heading for a 60 point whipping.

The good news for Toulouse is that the parallel isn't deterministic. They don't have to go the way of Laughton's Leeds, a string of pointless and expensive transfers and an abiding lack of a real team. Fortunately for them, they can't afford to, not having Leeds's advantages (namely, owning Yorkshire Cricket Club's ground). If they can keep their players and train up physically, they would be a match for any Super League side. One of the few good things about fitness domination of the game is that fitness can always be improved with time, effort, and cash. Talent doesn't scale.

On another point, Leeds's behaviour fitted depressingly well with a team who didn't try very hard in the first half, came close to getting in trouble but won heavily because they outlasted the opposition. After the last try, they fetched Barrie McDermott to take the conversion. Barrie Mac, for the uninitiated, is a giant prop forward who hasn't kicked a ball once in fifteen or so years as a pro. It was an arrogant, mocking gesture that betrayed a lack of respect for worthy opponents and poor sportsmanship (as was a succession of high tackles earlier in the game). Years ago, I remember, during a Leeds-Bradford match that turned into a heavy Leeds win, Ellery Hanley was invited to take a late penalty kick in order to punch his 100th goal on the record book. But that was the great Ellery's last season, and he did have the other 99 goals.

We now face the delightfully brutal prospect of a Leeds-Hull final, which will rock the Pennines, even though it's held in Cardiff. Leeds-Hull is a derby that out-nasties almost anything else but Wigan-St Helens, in fact probably beats it for tribal loathing. To the Hull fans, Leeds are a bunch of spoilt rich brats who always steal their best players. To the Leeds fans (and everyone else), Hull are a bunch of semi-civilised, violent fishwives who riot, alone among RL supporters. Back in 2000, a Leeds-Hull semi in Huddersfield ended with them invading the pitch, destroying the goalposts and being charged by mounted police. Everyone was shocked and surprised - everyone, that is, except for followers of my own club, Keighley, because they'd done it to us back in 1996. 'Tis very much to be hoped they behave.

Tony Blair, Formula One - old post revisited

No doubt everyone else noticed the report that the Govt. was again interfering with the exact details of the ban on tobacco advertising, exactly as a large donor to the Labour Party from the Formula One racing world would have wanted. I'm just trying to work out why Blair loves F1 so - clearly he does, more than would be justified by the fairly paltry sum involved or even the number of engineers the teams employ in southeastern marginals. I have a little theory, which I expounded a while ago, back when the blog was young and Alistair Campbell had just been rousted from Downing Street. You can read it here: Campbell, Tony Blair, and the Rolling Stones.

Essentially, my thesis is that our prime minister belongs to a particular character type found among British, educated, middle-class men who feel their educated, British, middle-classness somehow detracts from their masculinity. Such types tend to overcorrect, seeking out self-reinvention and the approval of more macho characters. This was what drew Blair to the whisky swiggin' tabloid hack, Campbell, and it's also why he likes spooks so much. It was probably also this that led him to form a band, which is a classic response in itself.

And I suspect it's what draws him to the pitlane bosses like Ecclestone and Eddie Jordan.

The Orwells, No.2, and a note on policing

Given that the Orwells are meant to be a regular feature, I really must get one out for the last seven days quicksmart...and here it is. This week's Orwell nomination for the political misuse of the English language goes to Sir Ian Blair, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, for inventing the concept of a "Shoot-to-Kill-to-protect policy". This is nonsense, as they say, on stilts. For a start, there is no such thing as a shoot-not-to-kill policy - I've never heard of anyone with military or police firearms experience who thinks that it is practical or desirable to do anything else with a firearm than shoot to kill. It's probably good for all parties to remember that once guns are involved it's become a deadly business, as this may restrain both criminals and police from using them lightly, waving about replicas, and such. The problem is whether or not the police have a shoot policy, in the sense that they have taken a decision in advance to shoot at people suspected of terrorism rather than not shooting at them if at all avoidable.

The "to protect" bit is simply nauseating, and is anyway meaningless - why on earth would the Met shoot otherwise than "to protect"? So, your nomination is on the way, Sir Ian. (And by the way, could you possibly avoid badmouthing your colleagues from West Midlands after they succeed where your lot failed?)

Last week's events, which panned out while I was in distant Lochaber and happily feeling utterly disassociated from the metropolitan paranoia cooker, bear out a point I've been trying to make for some time. In our time of terrorism, two different and opposed traditions of policing are clashing. One is the original British tradition stretching back to Robert Peel, based on the principles of policing by consent, local accountability, and systematic investigation of specific crimes. The other is one we might associate with Wilhelmine Germany or postwar France, which may be characterised as policing by suspicion, public-order policing, or preemptive policing. The emphasis is on preparing to suppress riots, and the theoretical base is that the citizens are a potentially hostile force that must be watched in its aggregate in case it turns on you. So you need the armed power to crush it and the authority to lock up the ringleaders first. This thinking is expressed in legislation like ATCSA, the Terrorism Act, Asbos and the like: we, the state, know who the plotters are, or at least who might be a plotter, so we need the right to punish them before they do anything wrong.

The other tradition says instead that we know nothing in advance, but that the criminal will give us the information at the time they give us a reason to lock them up: they will leave clues which can be used through detective work to identify them. This tradition, although it cannot prevent crimes, is more robust in the face of our limited knowledge of the future. It only helps to be able to lock people up without trial if you know who they are - if you don't, your strategy is set at naught. The terrorism crisis has shown this with blinding clarity. None of the new pre-emptive policing measures helped at all, but the classic effort of investigation from the details of a specific offence has traced the complete plot with impressive speed.

What worries me is that the spectacular detective achievement of rolling up the tube bombers may end up as a swansong, a last great case for The Inspector before the security bureaucrats roll up the old uniform and stick it in some efficient piece of office furniture in their new Mearsham Street fortress. Farewell not only The Bobby but The 'Tec. Greet the brave new world of biometric ID, monster databases and automated profiling.

Against this, I propose that one particular investigation might be vital to defend the notion of investigative policing itself: the investigation of Jean Charles de Menezes' death by copper. It seems obvious to me (at least) that this is a classic case of a systems failure that produced an apparent failure of judgement by the human instrument. It's the kind of event that, in the past, led to pilots being pilloried over incidents that were in fact preordained by management and engineering factors beyond their control. The chain of decisions that killed Menezes runs something like this: decision to watch the block of flats, decision to follow him, decision not to apprehend him immediately, decision to let the bus continue on its way, decision not to apprehend him after leaving the bus, decision to shoot when he entered the tube station. If any one of those switches had been set the other way, he would still be alive and fitting fire alarms to Kilburn.

Admin Time

Well, here we are on August the 1st, which is of course Yorkshire Day! You may be interested to know that, according to the team of dedicated Germans from Blogcounter.de who monitor my traffic stats, last month saw a three-figure average daily unique hit rate for only the second time in Ranter history. On average, 131 unique users checked in daily throughout the month. Naturally, much of this was the work of Osama bin Laden, whose minions drove some 696 uniques through the blog on Thursday, July 7th - setting a site record and beating the past mark, which occurred in May when BoingBoing.net linked to a post regarding Vienna's new freight trams. However, that spike hardly overshadows regular performances in the 100 region. With the high-traffic month, the Ranter came close to achieving an all-time average in three figures - average unique dailies for the period covered by the new (Blogcounter) stats are currently at 99 unique hits/day. Can we push on over that? Surely we can.

Whilst we're on the subject of stats, it's been a good week for DSRs (Disturbing Search Requests). TYR is no.1 on Google for "george clooney foreign parachute wings in peacemaker". It is also no.15 on Yahoo for tony blair embarrassing images, and no.17 on Yahoo for "is rupert murdoch an arms dealer?" And, even more bizarrely, it is the top result on Wanadoo's search function for tony blair simian line. Really weirdly, on the same page with me are Soj and the Guardian Newsblog, although none of us has ever mentioned it. Apparently, a simian line is a feature in palmistry that the PM displays - the mumbo-jumbo merchants claim it means "living more intensely with an undercurrent of uneasiness". Who knew?

North

Just to say there will be no ranting for the rest of the week, as I'm off to the West Highlands and am unlikely to have internet access, or for that matter a computer.

The Turks Are Coming! (Maybe)

On terrorday last week I read a very worrying report in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard regarding an interview the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, gave to Hurriyet. I haven't been able to find any mention in the anglophone press, but it's very important if true. Here is a link to Der Spiegel's report of it, anyway. The story is essentially as follows: Turkish PM goes to Turkey's top newspaper - and threatens to invade Iraq. Erdogan sez, "we can't stand much more, and if it's necessary we will invade". He's referring to a recent rash of Kurdish guerrilla activity in the south-east. This is very serious indeed.

Bizarrely, though, I really can't see what the benefit of invading Kurdistan is to Turkey; you have to assume that the Kurds will fight like hell, and will make use of any and all kit and money provided to the peshmerga in their role as part of the Iraqi army as well as whatever they can obtain from the Iraqi arms bazaar. And when they get to Mosul (or wherever)? What then? Try another thirty years' coercion? Go home tamely? At the moment, Turkey is protected to a large extent from the jihad raging in Iraq: by the existence of Kurdistan. The Kurds hate jihadis like, well, bloody death hatred and kill'em whenever they get the chance. They've traditionally enjoyed good relations with such organisations as the CIA and the Israelis. I wouldn't be at all surprised if an independent Kurdistan applied to join the EU. But once the Turks go in, you can rely on a large movement of the New-Old Iraqi Army up there to fight the Nato-linked, EU-corrupted apostate betrayers of the capital of the Caliphs. For the first time, they will recruit up north too. The Kurds may hate them, but if it comes down to a serious matter like land they'd make common cause with Idi Amin if it helped. And they, the jihadis, will take the war to Turkey itself.

If I was a Turkish spook, I wouldn't be planning to attack the Kurds. I'd arm them, trade with them, finance them, and sleep soundly knowing I had one of the most bitter bunches of mountain killers in the world between me and the chaos in Iraq. And I'd still have the menace of invading them available. Just one thing: do not declare a sovereign state - yes, be one, but don't say it. I wouldn't want to be shot by my own side.

Another bizarre thing in the statement is that, according to the Turkish Army, US forces have been ordered to arrest the PKK leadership. If this is true, what happens to the Kurdish forces that make up the few effective Iraqi government units? And the US force (one brigade) up north does not look a lot in that case, aside from a lot of fools.

Some more here - Die Welt

The Battle of Stockwell: We Lost

Well, now we know. The man the Met shot five times in Stockwell tube station was completely innocent. What went on in south London in the last two days (the shooting, the multiple arrests) was a major battle in the war that seems to be emerging about us. And we lost. Fortunately, the dead man was not a Muslim, or all hell would probably have broken loose. But it's bad enough - imagine the cranking-up of the level of fear and the greater alienation from the police. One of the reasons suicide bombing works is precisely because the possibility of suicide bombers causes police and troops to shoot at anyone they suspect. Exactly this occurred in the first weeks in Iraq.

But the problem is worse than one shooting. Remember the time-line: he was under surveillance as a suspect, he was followed to the tube, they attempted to arrest him and he ran away, then they shot him. Surveillance is an incredibly resource-guzzling business; I recently read that a successful operation against an IRA Quartermaster in the early 90s used no less than sixty agents from the MI5 surveillance force, the Watchers, to say nothing of the police contribution. So, God knows what percentage of the available surveillance force was busy following an innocent man around, and ended up shooting him. Where is the terrorist they were meant to be following?

Another point: you may remember the long-running case regarding Harry Stanley, an Irishman who was shot by the Met because he was carrying a table leg in a bag, which some bloke in a pub convinced himself was a gun. The courts found the police guilty of unlawfully killing Stanley, the police appealed, the case continues. What happened to Stanley was that, in profound peace, someone shouted "Freeze! Armed police!" at him from behind. Now, I really doubt anybody who wasn't expecting to be challenged by armed police would not have turned their head in the direction of the noise, especially if they'd been drinking. And they immediately plugged him. (It's now in doubt, after re-examination of the forensics, whether he did in fact turn as the police claimed.) The man shot in the tube came from a country where it is not uncommon for people to be shot in the streets by some nameless authority for reasons that are never given, to one where the police do not even usually carry anything deadly. I suppose that was why, when he realised he was being followed by men with guns (in civilian clothes), he ran away. We are, however, now a country where you can be shot at any time for any or no reason.

There are the usual explanations. Split-second decision...need to maintain confidence..haunted for ever more. Of course, there is some truth to 'em, but it wasn't a "split-second decision" to put him under surveillance as a suspected terrorist, and if that had not happened he would never have been shot. Sir Ian Blair should probably resign, but it isn't going to happen. We are, after all, at War.

Slightly off-topic, Robert Sneddon comments that:

" The Glock pistols and most other pistols don't burst-fire. There are a few which can do this but only if they are mated to a shoulder-stock, and this would make the pistol very bulky and not able to fit into a belt holster. The H&K VP-70Z and Beretta 93-R are two such pistols."

Some googling suggests otherwise, here for example, or here, which seems a better source. However, it's the Glock-18 or -18C that is the select-fire version. Whether the police have them or not I dunno. That's quite enough gunblogging.

Just to add my mite to the speculation pile

..the reason why they shot the Stockwell tube "bomber" five times might be that a pistol like the Glock 17(I think) that fires bursts of three rounds as well as single shots, rather like a tiny submachine gun, was used. The point is that, if you need to be sure the target is dead (for example, because they are a suicide bomber) in a confined space, most weapons that would do it would probably also go straight through them and kill one or more random civilians. Using a much lighter round, but several of them, is a way round that.

[/machoblogging]

Cricket update: Aussies now 140 for 3 after we were out for 155. Not critical yet, but we've got to cage the buggers quick or the run chase is going to be pretty tough.

Barnoldswick Moor - Or War!

Mark Steyn:

"t has been sobering this past week watching some of my "woollier" colleagues (in Vicki Woods's self-designation) gradually awake to the realisation that the real suicide bomb is "multiculturalism". Its remorseless tick-tock, suddenly louder than the ethnic drumming at an anti-globalisation demo, drove poor old Boris Johnson into rampaging around this page last Thursday like some demented late-night karaoke one-man Fiddler on the Roof, stamping his feet and bellowing, "Tradition! Tradition!" Boris's plea for more Britishness was heartfelt and valiant, but I'm not sure I'd bet on it. The London bombers were, to the naked eye, assimilated - they ate fish 'n' chips, played cricket, sported appalling leisurewear. They'd adopted so many trees we couldn't see they lacked the big overarching forest - the essence of identity, of allegiance. As I've said before, you can't assimilate with a nullity - which is what multiculturalism is.

So, if Islamist extremism is the genie you're trying to put back in the bottle, it doesn't help to have smashed the bottle. As the death of the Eurofanatic Ted Heath reminds us, in modern Britain even a "conservative" prime minister thinks nothing of obliterating ancient counties and imposing on the populace fantasy jurisdictions - "Avon", "Clwyd" and (my personal favourite in its evocative neo-Stalinism) "Central Region" - and an alien regulatory regime imported from the failed polities of Europe. The 7/7 murderers are described as "Yorkshiremen", but, of course, there is no Yorkshire: Ted abolished that, too."

Is the man completely mad? Now, there are plenty of Yorkshiremen who sweat from the eyes and judder with rage at any mention of t'Boundary Commission of 1974 (or whenever), but blaming terrorism on it is truly amazing. And he waited - what? - all of two days after Heath's death to draw a moral equivalence between joining the EEC and blowing folk up. Further down the story, he picks up on the Dilpazier Aslam row - but mysteriously doesn't bother to attribute it to the, ahem, blogger who built it. Where, Sir, is your decency?

And, what with all the flagwaving ("Best of British, old thing"), you might even have thought he wasn't a Canadian immigrant. Pah!

Thursday Terror Blogging

Reports of small explosions at The Oval, Shepherd's Bush and Warren Street tubes, plus an "incident" on a bus in Hackney. Maybe I should make that last one clearer - they're now reporting a small explosion on a bus in Hackney. Buses in Hackney probably experience dozens of incidents a day. One injury reported so far. Witnesses say they saw someone leave a large rucksack on a Victoria Line tube train before running like hell. Which puts the suicide bombing did-they-didn't-they in another light. It is being suggested that the police are looking for someone on the surface at Warren Street...which is even closer to my office than Tavistock Square was.

But on the other hand, Australia are six down for 175 and Steve Harmison has been bouncing the ball off their heads all day. Convict captain Ricky Ponting copped one through the visor of his helmet that laid his cheek open. Now that's fast. A couple of balls later he rattledly wafted at a good length and edged to Andy Strauss in the slip cordon. Good drills! Oh, make that 7 down, Warne run over by the Durham express. Whoops - 8 down now! Katich goes, caught behind, and it's three so far for Harmison and looking damn like a five-for.

In other news, University College Hospital has apparently been "sealed off by police". Part of it is just across the road, but it looks normal enough. Oh, that should read *armed* police, and someone says they've seen men in chemical protection gear, although you never know and they could be Ronald McDonalds.

Just to round off, I'll say this: at the end of the Dutch wars in the 1600s, De Ruyter and Tromp's ships sailed up the Medway to burn the fleet at anchor, taking a complacent government by surprise and incidentally boosting Samuel Pepys's career. In 1941, not far off three hundred years later, a Free Dutch warship collided with the anti-submarine boom across the Medway. The admiral in charge - the Flag Officer C-in-C, Nore - signalled "What, again?"

Update, 1502: It's now being reported that four explosive devices were placed but seem to have failed to explode, although the BBC is saying they were "dummy bombs". Sure the electricity system's all right, Beeb? No power surges or anything? Police now confirming they're at UCH. In Shepherd's Bush, meanwhile, there's supposedly a suspect package on. There is some mobloggage here, with video of a pub being cleared here. Usual liveblogga suspects are operating normally. And LAY OFF THE DAMN MOBILES.

Update, 1508 Tim Worstall comments at Nosemonkey's that the attack is so amateurish it could almost be the BNP trying to stir up racial tension. Funny he should say that. Their führer, Nick Griffin, is on trial at Leeds Crown Court today, and according to a "source" in the building the fascists were raising quite a bit of hell outside.

Update, 1526 Apparently, staff at UCH have been told to look for a 6ft 2in black man with wires sticking out of a rucksack. Not like he's going to merge into the background.. Wonderfully, there are multiple reports of someone fiddling with a bag, hearing a small bang or pop, and then either exclaiming something or looking "extremely dismayed". It must be deeply embarrassing - you press the tit or pull the wire or push the button, expecting a blinding flash and then paradise, but all you get is an artificial fart and a tubeful of people staring at you. Terrorism's answer to premature ejaculation. Darling, this doesn't usually happen to me...

Update, 1532 A man has been arrested outside the Ministry of Defence and taken to Richmond House. (According to Perfect.co.uk) This is weird - Richmond House, 79 Whitehall, is the Department of Health!

In the really important story of the day, the Australians are all out for 190 in forty overs. And Steve Harmison got his five-for - 11 overs, no maidens, 5 wickets for 43. If I were them I'd be shitting bricks, look what happened in the cricket two weeks ago.

Update, 1739 Well, everything seems to be calming down. Two men have supposedly been arrested but they are looking for an unknown number of fugitives. The UCH alarm has been stood-down. One wonders how stupid you'd have to be, having failed to blow up, to go to hospital..but then it would fit with what seems to have been a case of piss-poor performance from the general enemy. Meanwhile, the first demented yank troll has arrived and is poisoning the atmosphere over at Worstall's. Commenters are saying some sort of crisis is going on at Ludgate Circus, right on The Street Of Shame. Pity there's only AFP, the Jewish Chronicle and the Beano left there to watch.

And I'm really pissed off by the fucking CRICKET. 49 for 5. Ouch. Oh well, we'll do what we've always done. Improvise, adapt and overcome.

The Orwells

Good afternoon, hello, and welcome, ladies and gentleman, to this week's inaugural Orwell Awards Ceremony! This week's Orwell goes to Ms. Beverly Hughes, who scooped the palm by naming her all-new scheme to issue all teenagers with a smart-card that would "allow them to access activities and sports" and could be revoked if they don't behave. Naturally, Ms. Hughes didn't want to mention that this won't work without a Really Big National Database of all teenagers, to go with the really big national database of all children (and their parents) her department already wants to set up.

So, she invented a new misuse of the English language for political ends. The Academy, of course, has created the Orwell Award to recognise excellence and best practice in the political misuse of English. For naming this latest stealth ID card project "Opportunity Cards", an Orwell Award nomination to Beverly Hughes!

Right. I intend to make this a regular feature. Every week, we'll have an Orwell nomination, and at the end of the year we'll do a poll for the annual Orwell Award. (I'm thinking of this as - not a statue - but a badge of some kind. Perhaps an ID card?) The question is, though, whether the Orwells are a Ranter responsibility in the same way Worstall takes care of the Britblog Roundup or whether they should circulate, like one of the various Carnivals. Either way, if you have a comment, use the comments. If you want to propose someone for an Orwell, put the name and a link to the example in a sealed email to a.harrowell AT gmail.com.

That is all.

It Had To Happen...

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Let's Get Back Where This Blog Belongs - In Iraq!

In all the excitement, I didn't bother to write about the "Reid memo" regarding a proposed drawdown of western forces in Iraq. Yet another big story broken by the Times's Michael Smith, the document suggests that US forces might be down to 66,000 next year and UK forces to 3,000. Among "Risks" given in the document were that the Japanese engineer battalion might quit if their force protection was provided by the Iraqis, and that the Australians might not hang around either. Well, obviously. If a drawdown of foreign forces is in prospect, it seems overly hopeful to think the other foreigners won't notice.

I doubt very much if this is realistic. There has been plenty of this already. Drawdowns from Iraq are always just around the corner, and there has been much unfavourable news about the new-Iraqi forces recently (ghost recruits, corruption, general crapness). The only way this plan could be achieved would be to, in essence, accept partition and civil war. Presumably, the British withdrawal would be made possible by giving the SCIRI a free rein to run the state they want. (Anyone else spot that the governor of Basra was demanding a bigger share of oil revenue yesterday? "The patience of the sons of the south will not last forever". Sumer here we come.) And much of the US withdrawal would come from...wait. There is only one brigade up north as it is (the 173rd Airborne), and its main function is to deter the Kurds and Turks from attacking each other. Now, with 170,000 troops concentrated in central Iraq and Baghdad, we don't control territory well. How well will we do with 66,000, given that only small commitments elsewhere can be liquidated?

If this "plan" will happen, it can only happen in the context not of "drawdown" leaving the Iraqi government in charge, rah rah and Rule, Britannia, because it will mean abandoning much of urban Iraq, but of retreat. Would you want to be in the 66,000? I wouldn't. This only makes sense as the first phase of a phased withdrawal leaving the New-Old Iraqi Army, the SCIRI and the Kurds to fight like cats in a sack.

Return Tickets

There still seems to be a lot of doubt as to exactly how the bombs were triggered, or in other words whether or not the killers were true suicide bombers rather than own-goals or unwitting assassins. Amongst other things, property belonging to one of them was found at both the Edgware Road and Aldgate explosion sites. Now, no-one has ever managed to blow themselves up twice, and I'd hazard that no-one ever will, so either one of the other killers was carrying some of the other's goods (why? how?) or one of the bombs was placed on a train and detonated by a timer, while the bomber set off to bomb a second train. That, of course, would cast doubt on whether or not the other bombers were intentional suicide bombers.

There's a lot of tinfoil hattery bubbling about around this. I will only say that what is most important is that bombs were exploded, and that all the bombers seem to have died in the attack. The Postman argues that they might have been recruited to move drugs and that they were under the impression this was another load. Well. I suppose it's a possible explanation, but without more support, I feel most of the non-suicide/unwitting assassin theories are wishful thinking.

The latest source of doubt is that, apparently, they bought return tickets at Luton station and paid the parking fee. Well, buying a return ticket is not the obvious act of a suicide bomber, but there is a historic precedent of a sort. On the 21st October 1916, the Austrian prime minister Karl Graf von Stürgkh was assassinated in the Hotel Meissl und Schadin's restaurant on the Hoher Markt in Vienna as he enjoyed a post-lunch cigar. Stürgkh, an unmourned militarist thug on the far right of political Catholicism who had campaigned vigorously for war, had unknown to himself convinced Friedrich Adler, editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung (Workers' News), that he was a tyrant bent on expanding the war after he refused to allow parliament to be recalled. Adler sat down at a table, drank two glasses of beer, paid his bill, then drew a revolver and shot the prime minister three times, before sitting down to await the arrival of the police.

Adler was put on trial, but the trial was interrupted by the army authorities on the grounds that his speeches from the dock were a subversive influence. Instead a secret military tribunal sentenced him to death, but the death of Emperor Franz Josef II and his replacement by Karl I, who tried to get out of the war, led to his sentence being commuted to life imprisonment. The revolution of 1918 released him. He outlived everyone else involved, including the restaurant once famed for offering 14 different kinds of Tafelspitz, which was destroyed by the RAF one night in 1943.

Groping Towards Solution

Everyone knows what we should do about the danger of home-made jihadis. The Muslim community must do more to confront the extremists in their midst! And, on the other hand, we must strive to understand how these people came to commit such sickening acts. That's the robot consensus. As Tim Worstall's strapline would put it, though, it's all obvious or trivial. What is meant by "confront"? What is meant by "community"? What is meant by "extremist"?

Actually Existing Phil has been attempting to do some of this unpacking using the context of Italy's own home-made terrorist movement and the responses of the state and the analogous source community, in this case the broad Left. He estimates that the "scene" from which the Red Brigades' operatives were drawn numbered some 2,000 people, which is eerily similar to the former Metropolitan Police chief John Stevens' figure for the total number of potential jihadis in the UK. Just for that reason, that campaign should be worth studying. Here, Phil argues that, in fact, the Italian Left did exactly what was asked of it by the state, which was also what is now asked of "the Muslim community". That is to say, the Italian Communist Party launched an internal ideological campaign against those it perceived to be real or potential sympathisers. (Please bear in mind from this point that from around 1976 on, the PCI was committed to a parliamentary road to socialism and continued membership in the western security architecture, including both NATO and the EEC, or at least a European economic community if not *the* European economic community.)But, of course, the party leaders could not resist the temptation to a) include in the set of "extremists" anyone whose views did not fit their own preferences or threatened the historic compromise with the Christian Democrats and the office, funds and legitimacy it brought with it and b) to use the extremist brand to demonise their rivals on the Left.

What happened was that the Communist Party essentially wasted away, becoming increasingly beholden to the centre-right, whilst also alienating those to its Left. Extreme-Left terrorism and support for it actually increased as the party piled up new enemies. In essence, the party-base (the "leftist community") found that the official party represented their views progressively less, and that the movements that did were given a choice between joining the party in the government's boat, or be lumped in with the nutters and suffer the ostracism and police harassment that would entail.

Of course, an important point in Phil's analogy is that the similarities are still deeper. The coalition of industrial workers and intellectual lefties who made up the "leftist community" were seen by the PCI leadership as their own inalienable fief. The British Labour Party has frequently demonstrated a similar attitude towards Muslims in its Lancastrian and West Yorkshire fortress seats. Talk to the right "community leader" and they will get out the vote in the best Tammany Hall fashion. The Tories, incidentally, attempted in the 2001 election to reverse frame this by appealing to the citizens of Bradford West that they "should vote for someone from their community", or in other words that their candidate was a Muslim whereas the Labour candidate was a Sikh. It didn't happen, and Mohammed Riaz, local councillor and William Hague's "Race Adviser"/token Asian, trooped off into obscurity. (This weirdly American ward-boss political culture, by the way, showed up to worst effect in the Birmingham vote-rigging scandal.)

Phil's conclusion is that such a strategy (of tensions?) would benefit the Labour Party's partisan interests, but would undermine the fight against terrorism in the same way it did in Italy. Stepping off the kerb of reviewing Phil, one of the key points that emerges from almost all accounts of the suicide four's history is that they did not seek ideological satisfaction or inspiration in the mosque, or at least not in their mosque. There were clandestine meetings in a shutdown youth centre, and journeys of many miles to seek out particular preachers. This strikes right to the core of the problem. The "Muslim community" as non-Muslims perceive it - mosques, bearded old chaps in committees and such - which also produces the community powerbrokers of Brum could not have informed on them because they were living outside it. This is why people care about finding imams who will preach in English (I nearly wrote "in the vernacular" - there is something uncanny about exactly the same debates of the time of William Tyndale being rehearsed in 2005), and why it is necessary that they do engage with current politics. One point missing from the current blogswarm around the Guardian trainee and alleged jihadi Dilpazier Aslam is that, in his article that exercises the Right so, he made a very important point. If the mosque does not mention Iraq, that is not enough to seal it off as a topic of debate. Not letting the peasants read the Bible didn't prevent the Reformation, but it did mean that they would organise secret societies to do so.

What would a Euro-Islamic, by analogy with Euro-Communist, party look like? Or if you prefer, an Islamic Democrat party by analogy with Christian Democracy? (Don't forget that European CDs were mostly created to represent the Right in countries that had recently been fascist.)Would it be laughed out of court as an obvious sellout, drift to the extremes, or could it be more like the Turkish Justice & Development Party? Before crapping your pants, consider the definition of Eurocommunism used above. A parliamentary road to democratic socialism and no truck with the Warsaw Pact or the USSR. What might be similar minimals of acceptability for an IDP/EIP?

So, let us look at the possible strategies: 1. is the neo-Italian strategy of tensions, which we have just discussed in detail. 2. is accommodation. 3. would be some sort of Harry's Place-esque liberal-hawk British version of laicité. 4. would be pure repression. Well, we've just dealt quite harshly with 1. Some of 2. is probably essential. 3 is silly. Without getting into the debate about French hijabs, whether or not it would have been a good idea 40 years ago is irrelevant. Trying to implement it now would only fuel the fire without much benefit. However, it might be useful in selling 2. 4 is, in essence, having the police be extremely unpleasant to Muslims, and in all probability Sikhs, Italians, Greeks, Hindus and anyone else an idiot might think was one. It won't work, either, for the simple reason that it's always the one you didn't see that gets you. Has anyone else noticed that the 7th of July bombings essentially marked the bankruptcy of Blunkett/Clarke's antiterrorist strategy, which was basically that we knew who was a terrorist and all that was needed was the power to detain without trial/deny communications/monitor at all times? Why hasn't he resigned?

Blogrot

It's worrying me just how many bloggers are flipping over into tinfoil land lately. There may have to be revisions to the blogroll...

How the hell did I miss that?

David McDuff@A Step At A Time:

"While Yushchenko believes that the Ukrainian troops have shown themselves "to be true professionals and patriots," (Channel 5, August 10, 2004) other coalition members do not share this opinion. During military skirmishes last year, Ukrainian troops reportedly retreated and U.S. and British troops had to be called in to regain control over the area.

Corruption is a major problem. Major-General Serhiy Savchenko, commander of Ukrainian forces in Iraq, was arrested in February at Kyiv's Borispil Airport, when he and other officers were caught "escorting" coffins containing $300,000 in cash (Ukrayinska pravda, June 13). The practice of transporting contraband (i.e. narcotics, cash, etc.) in coffins, rather than the remains of soldiers, has a long history going back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan."

Fill in the Viktor Bout bit here...

This sounds, by the way, like a case for the Office of Sleazy Intelligence:

"Lefties tend to be drawn towards D-Day, and visions of a mighty host liberating a continent from fascism. And as I understand it, righties tend to sniffle over the Battle of Britain, which harks back to the days of individual combat by champions and so sets British history in a pleasingly organic context.

Not me. I would have been a sleazy intelligence officer, baffling the jerries with double crosses, triple thinks and quadruple bluffs from my headquarters, the Office of Sleazy Intelligence.

As I see it, the Office of Sleazy Intelligence was located in seedy-genteel quarters round the back of Shepherd Market, handy for the Café Royal and subject to constant patrolling by Ladies of the Night with their fur coats, high heels and small dogs.

“Doing business?” they would ask as I sauntered past and skipped up the rickety stairs. Of a kind madam, of a kind. Very special business as it turned out, business involving gold bullion, exploding rats, inflatable tanks and secret pornography.

My own office, the head Office of the Office of Sleazy Intelligence, would be stuffed to bursting with bonded whisky, crisp reichsmarks, silk stockings and other items for the equipment and consolation of haunted ladies, destined for France and inevitable doom in the Cellars of the Gestapo.

Later, I would follow the victorious hosts of democracy to the Continent. Theirs would be the honour and the glory. I’d settle for half the German treasury, obtained in return for two crates of spam and a carton of Craven A."

Wouldn't we all, Jamie...Getting back to business, I really must take steps about Chichakli.com, which will mean a detailed refutation. Either that or an exploding rat and a ton of inflatable bullion.

Well, Back To The Terrorblogging It Is, Then

So we know now: the terrorists set off from various parts of Leeds, some unfamiliar, some familiar to me. This depressed me so much I couldn't really be bothered to blog about it, but we may as well let it slither out in the open. Leeds was always very different to Bradford; it wasn't in Leeds that copies of The Satanic Verses were burned or where I was chased towards a police dog squad by the mob during the 2001 race riot. Partly, I suppose, this was just the divisions being lubricated by money, as Leeds even at worst was always richer than its twin city. Not, though, that there weren't really nasty districts like Gipton or Chapeltown (a few years ago). But it wasn't from there that the killers came. Another argument is that unlike Bradford, Leeds had a long and honourable tradition of accepting migrants (the Kindertransport kids being exhibit A, followed by the immediate post-war West Indians). But that shouldn't be overstated - Bradford's history includes very considerable German influence starting in the 19th century. We don't boast about it, but Bradford even produced its own Nazi, Ernst Wilhelm Bohle, führer of the Nazi Party's Germans Overseas Organisation and intimate of Rudolf Hess. Now that's what I call multiculturalism.

But it happened. I fear that whatever real unity or tolerance existed is now under serious threat. I also suspect that it existed far less than we boasted of it. We may recall that, to take an iconic Yorkshire example, West Yorkshire's Pakistanis formed their own cricket league, the Quaid-e-Azam League, named for Mohammed Ali Jinnah. You might think, and I did, and no doubt I was taught to think, that this was a fine local institution. But the reason for its existence was simply because its founders couldn't join the horde of existing league cricket clubs. It was 1992 before anyone not born in Yorkshire could play for Yorkshire; although one of the first new recruits was Sachin Tendulkar, no less, I can't think of anyone from Muslim Yorkshire who's got very far at Headingley. In my own sport, Rugby League, I can think of only two: Ikram Butt of Featherstone Rovers and England, and a scrum-half from Leigh (in Lancashire, of course), Sarfraz Patel, who bamboozled the Keighley defence all afternoon as the Leigh fan directly behind me jeered him until he was warned to shut up by the stewards. One of the killers was a cricket fanatic.

Yes, I know it's a slightly frivolous example, but I think it illustrates the point. Only at best was Yorkshire in the 1980s and 90s "multicultural". At worst, it was a ramshackle coalition of interests, as Lord Curzon belittled the Indian Congress; just a collection of mutually uninterested, rather than necessarily hostile, groups inhabiting the same space without making contact. And the best and the worst were simultaneous. Bradford could burn while Keighley was peaceful, so it was always possible to point out the good in response to the bad. Or vice versa: see the American blowhards falling over themselves to denounce Britain and laud France, when on Wednesday, July 6th, Tony Blair was a saint to them and Jacques Chirac on a par with Saddam Hussein. And see the BNP busily spreading the poison. Nosemonkey of Europhobia was the first, I think, to point out that their targeting of Dewsbury might have contributed to the killers' recruitment. Well, I'm really pleased to see that the BNP's challenge in the Barking council election has tanked. After the "bus-bomb" leaflet, they got just what they deserved. And this is serious. According to Juan Cole, a key goal in al-Qa'ida thinking is to turn western societies fascist. Terror will lead to repression, repression to radicalisation, radicalisation to more terror.

This is an interestingly Western insight: it is, of course, Hegelian logic, the dialectic, hacked out like a chunk of code and wired into the ideology of jihad. Interestingly, every totalitarian movement has at some point found this doctrine useful: it was at the very foundation of communism, fascists enshrined it as the Backlash Strategy, now the jihadis have grabbed it. In itself, it is a powerful explaining force, but in the version they us it is disgusting. (It's also anti-Hegelian - after all, the conflict of thesis and antithesis brings forth synthesis, but these people certainly do not want to incorporate any of the values of the detested enemy.) So, let us get this completely clear: people who argue for measures of revenge against broad groups ("Muslims", "immigrants" - you provide the rest) are traitors. They are doing the enemy's work.

Oh, by the way, Richard Garcia: I'm glad you are taking such a heroic anti-terrorist stance - 12,000 miles away in Japan, according to your IP address. Fascist expats piss me off deeply, because you give me a bad reputation when I have to visit places you live. (You can probably guess that, no, I'm not a social worker.) When you've finished reciting the Scum's editorials, I'd advise you to consider the relative levels of terrorist threat we are subject to, then fuck off.

I Really Don't Want To Write About Terrorism

Last night, having walked from work up to Highgate (in an hour, which I think isn't bad going and at least got me there before it rained), I spent most of the evening with curry and a few beers, watching the blanket wall-to-wall TV terror until I decided that I didn't want to see the same photos again. It didn't seem like a good idea at all to keep rehearsing this stuff, so I decided to shut it off and do the washing up. But, of course, this morning there were the newspapers. On the 390 bus, I sat reading the Grauniad, crammed with terror stories and half-page photos (and that was by no means the least restrained coverage - the Daily Express took it on itself to somehow discover 38 more deaths, and all the small-formats/tabloids ran full front page photos) as it went extremely slowly through King's Cross, past the sealed-off entrances to Russell Square and took the whole of its schedule to get to Gower Street, where I bailed out to walk the rest of the way. (Traffic is just as plentiful today as on any normal day, but the continuing cordons around some of the bomb sites have fucked up the flow, and the fact that only half the Tube is running does the rest.)

In the office, my email inbox(es) are stuffed with terrormail - condolences (for what - I'm not the one who suffered), a request from a radio station in Arizona for an interview, yards of fuckwit troll abuse. The blogosphere is talking of nothing else. I have to scan about thirty news sites for business reasons, but of course they are all flooded with terrorism. Even the specialists are talking about how well the telecoms system held up. The masterpiece was the report that, whilst everyone else suffered, Skype users could speak as they pleased. This is surely not the time for advertorial. Someone in our HR department recently quit, and there was a lunch do in a nearby bar, where - of course - everyone talked about terrorism. I'm terror'd out. It doesn't even worry me.

But needs must when the devil drives. First up, that "power surge". Thanks for the comments regarding how the attack would have first become apparent at underground control. I take your point, but both the Grauniad and the Handelsblatt, the German FT, this morning report that according to a "London Underground source", the "surge" was a "communications ploy". The stations affected are, it turns out, on different electrical circuits. I remain angry about it because I think the public has shown that we are quite grown-up enough to deal with the truth. At no time yesterday did I see any sign of trouble or panic of any kind, even tramping through Kentish Town the mood remained entirely civil.

On the way north, I was phoned up by a colleague at The Sprout who argued that "it didn't seem like Al-Qa'ida; thirty wouldn't be enough". I replied that the Cats' Protection League could be ruled out, and that even al-Qa'ida made mistakes. It strikes me that it could have been much worse, and the why deserves thought. It was certainly a propitious day for terrorism: the G8 in session in Britain, with much military and police effort directed there. The risible caricature fanatic Abu Hamza going on trial. An Israeli minister in town, and the Olympic win (which took the Mayor and various senior civil servants off to Singapore). But at least two of those were unpredicted - was it a rushed job? (And if so, was the bus bomb an unintended consequence?) It's called overdetermination - they are all reasons, but you can't tell which combination is the right one. There's something of a blogodebate as whether this means that the "Power of Nightmares thesis" is finished. Unfortunately, no-one seems to have fully grasped that Adam Curtis never suggested that Islamist terrorists didn't exist; just that al-Qa'ida as anything other than a set of ideas doesn't.

A set of ideas - an ideology - is the most threatening thing there is, anyway. And that is why Ken Livingstone came up with the best speech of the lot, ten times better than either Blair's first, crappy, effort or his second (platitudinous) go.

I know that you personally do not fear giving up your own life in order to take others - that is why you are so dangerous. But I know you fear that you may fail in your long-term objective to destroy our free society and I can show you why you will fail.

In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential.

They choose to come to London, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don’t want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.

Fuckin' brilliant. Whilst we're on that topic, another possible reason: Nosemonkey points out that two out of four - in fact, three out of four if you include the wilds of King's Cross - attacks took place in areas of sizeable Muslim population. Were they aiming for a backlash strategy? Dunno, but it's worth thinking about.

By the way: Apparently I've been put on a List of "Lefties making political points". Thanks. That's why I have a blog. (Billy Bragg: If you've got a blacklist, I want to be on it..) Presumably, had I called for a Christian Holy War for Monotheism that would have not been a political point? Or more accurately, I wouldn't be on your ridiculous list although I'd been making political points all over the shop. What with you, and Richard Chichakli calling me a Nazi on his new website, if I'm not making the right friends, at least I'm making the right enemies.

Oh, and Martin Geddes of Telepocalypse is worth quoting:

"anyone who thinks the British will be their ideological slaves under threat of violence hasn’t read their history books very thoroughly. Too many of our ancestors have crawled out of lice-filled trenches to emerge into freedom for you to stand any hope of victory."

Update

Well, I've taken my life in my hands and gone out to our local Italian caff to get some lunch. The streetscape is surprisingly normal, perhaps rather quieter than usual but even that could be explained by the rain (the Policeman's Friend in action). People are going about their business, traffic is moving; not very much traffic, though. The pubs seem fuller than usual for a Thursday lunchtime. The Middlesex Hospital, just across the road, has no Accident & Emergency role, so presumably this explains the calm. At the Cafe Verona, there seemed to be more takeaway orders than usual; terrorist bastards forcing us to change our way of life.

As a telecoms type, I should point out that O2 and Vodafone's networks are down for all intents and purposes (and are presumably operating telephone preference control to keep official traffic moving). Orange are up, but were down earlier. T-Mobile scooped the palm, with no apparent interruption of service. Readers in London will surely notice the need to minimise your use of phones and keep the lines clear. Use the internet instead.

This morning, I took my usual train into Waterloo and skipped down to the Bakerloo. The line had just been de-suspended, so there were more people than usual. After pulling out of Waterloo, the driver made an announcement that a major power failure had occurred "in the Baker Street area" and that the Metropolitan, Hammersmith & City, and Circle lines were suspended. Baker Street is not that far from the office, and I wondered if there was power there. I decided anyway that if there was going to be a power cut I'd rather be on the surface, so got off at Charing Cross. I phoned my editor's desk phone, but he wasn't in. I then delighted Osama by catching - what else - a bus north towards Oxford Circus. On Oxford Street I got off near a cross street that leads to my office. The driver was listening to a very long message over the bus system Private Mobile Radio (this would have been 0915 or thereabouts).

I learnt of the crisis from the web not long afterwards.

Back at the office, life continues as (un)usual. A couple of minutes ago, an army Lynx helicopter flew over heading north. At midday, everyone broke off to watch Tony Blair's address to the nation. About a quarter of a mile from one of the bus bombs, we all seemed a lot less rattled than he does. He repeatedly broke off, searched for words, and stuttered. Churchill it wasn't.

Update of an Update: To commenters - I agree the title of the last post is pretty strong, but I believed at the time the invasion of Iraq would make terrorism more likely. And I was extremely angry - I still am - about the "power surge" story. I suppose the point was to "avoid panic", but you can't get away from the fact that evacuating the Tube and transferring passengers to buses seems to have played into the terrorists' hands. I wouldn't have got on a bus for thousands had I known. It's also been suggested that the first sign of trouble might have been a power surge, but surely the explosions can't have been that ambiguous. Either they were lying to us or this was a weak spot in the emergency response, which seems to have been outstanding.

Blair Gets His Iraq Reward!

A succession of explosions has occurred at Underground stations in central London. The entire system has been shut down. A bus is reported to have blown up in Russell Square. The British Transport Police originally gave out that the Tube bangs were due to a "power surge".

Presumably, then, the bus was one of the many electric buses on the capital's streets. London is famed for its highly efficient trolleybus system. Not. No, the government is lying to us. The total and utter cunts! Power surge, my arse!

From my office window, for what it's worth, I can see blue flashers, stalled traffic (well, that's hardly unusual) and an editorial floor emptying with eerie rapidity. And - for a couple of seconds - they just sounded the fire alarm. How stupid can you possibly get? Naturally, we'd be far safer in the streets - with the terrorists. I, personally, intend to stay until they shoot my desk out from underneath.

The day after the Olympic announcement. Whilst Bush is in the country, and half the police force humping the sodden hills of Perthshire for his protection. Manoeuvre warfare? They've got all you need.

UPDATE, 1046: The National Grid is now quoted as follows by BBC News:

"The National Grid, which supplies power to the Underground, said there had been no problems with its system which could have contributed to the incidents."

Link. Fuck'em.

UPDATE, 1133, the BBC is now speaking of "multiple explosions". No. 10 Downing Street, for its part, says it doesn't know if it's a terrorist attack. Really, these people are like a cult without its guru when Blair's away. Here, the stayers-on are reacting rather well; I just finished an interview with a chap from the Open Base Station Initiative, my colleague Sean is getting on with some work, Nicky is answering the phones of the fled to reassure their friends. And - shock - my editor, who was coming from Clapham by tube, has just arrived this moment, reporting troops in the streets. By his description they are infantry or medics, no repeat no NBC kit or signals vehicles, which is all good.

The Swinging Spetsnaz Infrared Anorak

I am the fifth result on Yahoo! for "spetsnaz anorak". I am also the 13th result on Google for princess diana assassination. And why on earth am I getting referrals from www.about-swinging.co.uk/wife-swapping-yorkshire.html? (I've no idea whether the link is SFW, because I'm at work and don't dare click on it.) They seem to head for my archives for September, 2003. Most strange. I'm also the 15th Google for improvised explosive device infrared triggers.

This, incidentally, is a list of the top 40 search requests:

yorkshire ranter 172
the yorkshire ranter 25
richard chichakli 23
jetline international 18
ranter 18
xv179 16
custerbattles 14
chichakli 11
teebah airlines 11
bbc stupidity 8
bill boakes 6
viktor bout 6
john towers 6
stevens express leasing 6
pakistaniporn 6
shanaz rashid 5
latif rashid 5
imad saba 5
jetline sharjah 5
iraqbabes 5
goliaf air 5
yorkshire 5
ali kleilat 5
lin homer 4
jukjs2@aol.com 4
tl-acu 4
empire of mogilno 4
gay wank 4
ramsan kadyrov 4
alex harrowell 4
kingdom of papala 4
kh55 missile 4
victor bout 4
jeff wode 4
transafrik 3
jet line international 3
hussain al-khawam 3
commodore michael clapp 3
lord browne gay 3
techtronic rover

Update: Chris Lightfoot has this to say: The "wife swapping" referrer is presumably referrer spam -- many sites automatically post URLs of referring pages (e.g. as a list of recent searches finding the site), so spammers can manipulate this to advertise their site simply by making requests to your site with a "Referer: url-of-spam-site" header.

What a disappointment.

Brief Link: Glucksmann

A Step at a Time quotes French philosopher Andre Glucksmann:

"Et j’ai vérifié cela très vite par la suite, parce qu’en Yougoslavie, l’ancien chef communiste, Milosevic, a gardé le pouvoir, et a organisé des épurations ethniques, c’est-à-dire qu’il a fait des guerres qui ont fait 200 000 morts au moins. Il a martyrisé, torturé, exercé une dictature en faisant une union sacrée entre l’extrême-droite nationaliste et raciste, fascisante, et l’extrême-gauche. L’important ce n’était pas l’idéologie, mais la pratique, qui était en fait d’origine stalinienne. Et quand j’ai vu démarrer la guerre en Tchétchénie, je me suis dit : Milosevic fait des petits, la leçon de Milosevic passe de Belgrade à Moscou. Et donc, j’ai pris position contre tout de suite."

.

Mike has a fine post about ships and cranes. This fits with the last post, by the way: I really think any serious effort at modern Socialism has to think in terms of learning practical things, of having many trades...but I'm slightly drunk.